


That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-10 00:42:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4370696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is an almost fifteen-year difference in their ages; however, Bruce and Natasha can likely both say without exaggeration that they have experienced enough to fill several lives put back-to-back, and time is sort of a relative concept anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold

…

For five years after the Accident, which divides his life into eras with somewhat theological distinction, Bruce half-believes that he has stopped aging.

This idea follows him from Daneborg to Copenhagen, Rome to Cairo to Gwadar by way of the Red Sea and into the mountains of Tibet, along with the memory of a wasted bullet and the revolver used to fire it.

The still-nameless thing that now shares his brain, of course, follows too.  

Bruce imagines it as a fission reactor inside the cells, an endless cycle of destruction and regeneration like Prometheus chained to the rocks: fixing him in time, without the liberty to die, from now until the end of the world.

But how will it end, exactly? Bruce would suggest a flood, some cataclysmic climate change event, except God (who is indeed mysterious, if He exists at all) has already done that once before. So it will be a fire, then, or ice, like in the poem, or an epidemic, or an alien invasion.

It may even be a nuclear war, irony at its instructive finest.

Then what will come next? He’ll be the only thing left, the indestructible and self-sustaining and privileged inheritor of a charred aftermath, along with several resilient members of the Arthropoda phylum:  _The Man and the Cockroaches_ , the title to an unsettling children’s parable.

He will be alone – although he already is, at least in a manner of speaking, so maybe it won’t make much difference. 

And his father had promised this sort of comeuppance, hadn’t he? He’d just failed to provide specifications about when and how. Bruce shouldn’t be surprised.

 _(“You remember what we talked about? Sure you do, you’re a smart kid.”_  His father had been sitting behind a shatterproof window. He held the phone against one shoulder, head cocked to the side, the way Mom had done whenever her hands were full.  _“You’re going to tell those people in court the truth, not all the crap you were planning to…Robert? Bruce?…Bruce, I need to hear you. Tell me what you’re going to say.”_

 _“I’m gonna say – ”_ hereBruce had paused, wondering what would happen if he threw up, because his feet didn’t quite reach the floor from this chair and it would end up on his lap _“—I need to say ‘my dad’s never hurt me.’”_

 _“’Never laid a finger on me.’ And this was an accident, right? Right?…Atta boy.”_ Brian Banner had leaned forward with the intense solicitude of a confessor.The guards, standing together by the door, had laughed at something. _“Because you know what happens to people who get their old man sent off to jail, don’t you?”_

The phone had grown damp in Bruce’s hand. For a moment he had been struck by the thought of smashing it against the glass, watching the spider-web fracture open, and then he had answered.

 _“They’re punished”_. _)_

And the whole time Bruce is traveling, nobody aboard the flatbed trucks or coach buses or cargo ships ever asks for his name. 

Something in his thinned appearance averts curiosity: the pared-down face, the stiffened posture, the clarity of his bones and eyes. He carries a sparse and private pain about his person, which gives him the overall appearance of a man with his neck in the noose.

“Naa, naa,” he hears a woman whisper to her son, once. “Ksānta karā.”

They sit behind him on a train from Akahura to Laksham in Bangladesh. Bruce currently entertains some notion of traveling to the Philippines, hiring himself out to a merchant vessel headed for South America.

Their train is passing beneath a ridgeline, bodies crowded together inside a passenger car while others cling to its corroded sides and roof. The air is feverish-hot. Rails swish and rattle underfoot. Faces are created and then erased by swift, passing strokes of light, which come from electric bulbs hung on wire along the narrow black tunnel.  

Bruce glances over just in time to see a child’s hand be snatched back from touching him.

Ah.

He can’t blame the woman. It’s never wise to put your hands on a person who looks so much like they are dying: not that this is the right assumption to make about him, but it’s not entirely wrong either.

(So when Bruce discovers a gray hair floating in the washbasin, that first morning at his apartment in Rio de Janiero, he stops.

He stands there, silent. His face drips. He looks up into the cracked mirror and finds another at the crown of his head, another at his left temple. Forty, Bruce remembers.  He will be almost forty by now, the beginning of a decade or the end of one based on your valuation of zero.

That may not make much difference, either.)

…

In the years before she joins SHIELD, an event which cleaves the two halves of her life together or apart depending on your definition of that word  _cleave_ , Natalia does not think of herself as being any age in particular.  

This may be due to the fact that they don’t celebrate her birthdays. Why should one be rewarded for survival? It is the basest obligation, proof only of luck – not hers to claim – and skill – not hers to boast about. A backless evening dress and pearls around her throat can change her from a child of sixteen to a woman of twenty-one. A high-cut skirt and a guileless expression can change her from a woman of twenty-one to a child of sixteen.

But beyond that, she cannot retain the idea of being younger or older. It implies continuity, a past and a present and possible futures – hardly the suitable thing for a professional nobody.

 _(“Now tilt your head. Like this.”_  Madame B. runs a finger up Natalia’s spine, pulls her hair so that her chin thrusts forward.  _“It will make others feel small to look at you.”_

A familiar aria from Korsakov’s  _Snegúrochka_  plays on a gramophone in the corner. The song is meant to tell an audience how the Snow Maiden has just melted away, after falling in love, and ended a fifteen-year winter that began with her birth. 

There are five dried drops of blood on the polished wooden floor, from Elena’s lesson before hers – but Elena is slow, and stupid, and a bad listener.

Not like Natalia.

 _“Now smile, like a nice little girl. People will imagine you are being polite, and will never realize you are baring your teeth at them.”_ Madame B.’s lips are the color of pomegranates as she demonstrates.  _“Now look at me as though I am a man whose attention you must hold… Now tell a lie, and have your face say that you believe it with your whole heart.”)_

She is not someone who grows and ages, Natalia understands.

She is instead something being slowly and carefully made: honed, sharpened into a more perfect and finalized form as pieces are smoothed away.

And when she dies, all the evidence will be erased. Her body will be burned, or else cut free from any identifying scars and features before being abandoned to public curiosity. Clothing and photographs will be destroyed. Under pain of torture, nobody will claim to have ever known her. No proper grave awaits her, no stone bearing a name or defined set of dates to suggest she was ever one thing, one person.

Technically speaking, in fact, she’s already dead.

Official documents from an orphanage in Stalingrad attest to this. There’s even a copy of her death certificate, which Natalia is allowed to read on several occasions. It records in clear black font that she had died of tuberculosis, an uncreative and rather sentimentalist choice in her own opinion – something like “wrestling a bear” or “stalemated in a sword duel” would’ve been more interesting.

It’s a waste of paper, too; nobody ever came looking for her anyway.

(So when Director Fury – whose name is another matter of confused semantics, meaning sudden and unpredictable anger or deliberate and foretold punishment by the gods – asks how old she is, it takes her a moment.

 _“Twenty-two, sir,”_  Natasha says. She watches him write it down.  _“Almost. What difference does it make?”)_

…

Their lives are separated from one another by fourteen years, eleven months, and four days, December 18th of 1969 to November 22nd of 1984.

The year Robert Bruce Banner is born, people watch and listen as Neil Armstrong walks on the moon.  The year Natalia Alianovna Romanova is born, people purchase the first Macintosh personal computer and make what they see as clever allusions to the George Orwell novel. Both years are marked by varying predictions about the end of the world, or at least the end of civilized society and order, although this is more a defining feature of the twentieth century as a whole.

Rebecca Banner dies on June 21st, 1977, because she had been waiting until the summer to leave so that her son would not miss school. Natalia Alianovna Romanova, according to her government, dies on December 22nd, 1995, because this is the first day of winter and makes for a convenient choice.

Bruce Banner’s accident, or Accident, happens on April 16th, 2005. Natasha Romanoff joins SHIELD on November 21st, 2006.

(Whether these should be seen more as beginnings than ends, or vice-versa, once again falls to the duty of individual definition.)

They meet for the first time just outside Kolkata, India on May 2nd, 2012. 

They save the world several days later, and again for a second and third time in years that follow, thus disappointing a new century of doomsday prophets for at least the present time.

Although time, naturally, is as much a subject to distortion as the truth, as the self.

It is capable of expanding, or compressing, or fracturing into pieces like light through a prism: so that two or three different lives might be fitted into the span of one, so that neither Bruce nor Natasha looks at age as anything other than proof of what they have survived on their way to the present.

Or wherever it is they are, now.

( _“…Wait, you’re telling me this ancient thing is a Commodore 64?”_ Natasha raises her eyebrows at him.  _“What does it run on, steam? Coal?”_

 _“That would just make it industrial-age, not ancient.”_ Bruce dodges a lazily-swung elbow to the ribs, sticks a network interface card into the computer’s back.  _“All right, we should be able to transfer the data. Enter a command and see if it works.”_

 _“Oh, no. I’ll let you do the honors.”_ A wicked, entirely unaffected sparkle rides in her eyes. She gives him a broad wink. “ _You know what they say – age before beauty.”_

_“I prefer the idea of hope over experience.”_

_“Maybe, but that could apply to either one of us.”  
_

_“Point taken.”  
_

So when Natasha reaches over to run her fingers lightly through his hair, when Bruce smiles at her without the demand of having it returned, both understand that this  _–_  and maybe this alone  _–_   is what makes the difference.)

…


End file.
